Apple vs Open Source - Fans, Supporters or "True Believers"
When Extremism Damages the Brand
Joe Brockmeier wrote a post today on ReadWrite Enterprise suggesting that Richard M Stallman's intemperate, unsensitive, probably carefully considered and deliberately provocative, statement about Steve Jobs was contemptible.
Sadly, the diatribe of comment that follows the piece is predictable. Yes, Apple has done a lot that Stallman doesn't like, campaigns against, and is, in essence, anti-open source (The Register published a piece today giving ten reasons, some very compelling, not to buy an iPhone 4S).
While every movement, religion, belief, idea needs its originators, founders, believers, maybe even a few fanatics and fundamentalists, sometimes those fanatics and fundamentalists can damage the brand and movement beyond repair. Extreme Apple fans put people off purchasing macs and i-devices. Richard Stallman's unbending, unaccommodating fundamentailism is leading F/LOSS into a marsh in Venezuela whence it will never return.
At the end of August DrupalCon London showed how an open source project can thrive in the commercial world with much of its development arriving as contributions from businesses big and small. DrupalCon showed that open source software is not (all) developed by anti-Microsoft-spouting, anarchist teenagers with vitamin D deficiencies spending too much time coding and not having a social life. Even the list of contributors to the Linux kernel is dominated by enterprise (some may surprise): Red Hat, Intel, Novell, IBM, Microsoft, Broadcom, Atheros, Google, Samsung... apparently even the top individual contributor to kernel version 3.x is a Microsoft developer. The PR coming from the LibreOffice camp also seems encouraging and inclusive.
I hope the F/LOSS movement finds new voices, more temperate voices, voices that resonate in this great bazaar, not just the one shouting down and insulting anyone with a view not matching his own. Like a lousy politician, he gets some headlines, but no votes. F/LOSS needs more votes, but no more fanatics.
Written using Bean (GNU GPL), on a MacBook Pro (an old one, but still not open) and published using Posterous (free, though not, I think, open source).
